Google accounted for 67.95 percent of all U.S. searches in January, down from 69.67 percent in December 2010.

Bing, which also powers Yahoo’s organic results, saw its share of searches jump from 10.6 percent to 12.81 percent for the same period. Bing-powered search made up 27.44 percent of all searches, up from 25.77 percent. Searches on Yahoo declined to 14.62 percent, down from 15.17 percent. The remaining 4.61 percent of U.S. searches were conducted on 70 other search engines Hitwise tracks.

Bing (81.54 percent) and Yahoo (81.38 percent) also had their highest success rate in January, while Google had a 65.58 percent success rate. Hitwise defines a successful search as one that results in a visit to a website.

Meanwhile, on Compete’s list of the top 50 websites for December 2010, Bing passed Wikipedia to take the sixth spot with 79.8 million unique visitors. Compete reported that Bing closed the year with a 105.36 percent increase in unique visitors — the largest yearly growth among the top 50 sites.

With 149.9 million unique visitors, Google topped the list, followed by Yahoo (136.9 million uniques), Facebook (134 million uniques) in third, and YouTube (117.2 million uniques) in fourth.

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.